This Week in Geek (28/04-04/05/08)

Buys

A summer (and my vacation) approaches, I'm not surprised I would be investing in tv shows on DVD. Man cannot live on Julie Chen and Gordon Ramsey alone, you know! Of course, the point should be not to watch the damn things over the course of a couple days BEFORE the vacation hits. The Unit Season 1? See below. Veronica Mars Season 2? See below. Veronica Mars Season 3? Just a couple of episodes in I swear! (It's an illness.)

"Accomplishments"

I became interested in The Unit when I discovered the David Mamet connection, by way of his excellent black ops movie, Spartan. Found the first season at fairly cheap prices, just 13 episodes, and I wasn't disappointed. The world of special operations is very authentically drawn, with more variety than I would have thought. The ones Mamet actually wrote have a little extra sparkle, but the others are quite good too. While Dennis Heysbert and Regina Taylor carry the show with their presence, my early favorite is Grey. I'll certainly be looking to purchase/watch later seasons. Extras are slim, but the one commentary and few interviews answered all my principal questions, so I'm happy.

Veronica Mars... You may remember I fell in love with the show after watching the 1st season in 2 days flat and immediately ordered the rest. They came in Friday, and I'm now 3 episodes into Season 3! The 2nd Season had a more interlocked structure to its mysteries, more cliffhangers than the 1st, and so was may have been more addictive. Still, there was so much in there that I felt some elements weren't properly followed up on (like Wallace leaving with his bio-dad). Not so much Veronica's personal story, but a net thrown wide over Neptune. Still great. More extras than the first boxed set, including a short video diary from Kristen Bell, a featurette and 8 minutes of outtakes, in addition to the usual deleted scenes.

For Monday's RPG night, I took a page from Chaosium's Blood Brothers 2 (for non-Mythos Call of Cthulhu) and emulated a silent black and white horror movie. Players weren't allowed to use dialogue unless they wrote it on cards (of which they had a limited number). It was a very interesting experience, though I should have play-tested my candle-lit shadow puppets beforehand. The wax mess was pretty bad. Now I have to rewrite a number of character sheets.

Managed to complete my 10th Doctor set for the Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG, including 17 cards and javascript coding for virtual boosters and starters. Plus another card to go with the next set, a small premium series based on the first season of Torchwood. Here's the booster art for it:Someone Else's Post of the WeekSlay, Monstrobot of the Deep has hands down the best rant against Countdown I've read, 51 Issues and Nothing On. I couldn't agree more. DC Universe #0 promises a lot more and has no connection to Countdown so far as we can see, so truly, people could have saved themselves some trouble and money and gotten all the prologue they need to Final Crisis for 50¢. Sometimes, it's not easy to like mainstream comics.

I'm not sure what you mean by historical... Like the pair seen in Series 2's To the Last Man?

This small premium set only features 1 card per episode from Series 1. The main cast has already been featured in Relative Dimensions 3. And with the seal broken, more will appear in normal sets (I'm considering no more than a dozen cards per set).

The "historical" Torchwood will get its due, especially since it opens up possibilities for TW-related strategies elsewhere than the Postmodern Era. Already, Queen Victoria has the Torchwood Trait, and so does the group from The Impossible Planet in the Twilight Era.